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The Muslim Council of Britain misunderstood Eric Pickles' letter to mosques

Summary

The Department of Communities and Local Government wrote to about 1,100 mosques about the need to combat radicalisation.

The Muslim Council of Britain severely criticised this letter.

I explain how I believe the MCB misunderstood the letter.

I also illustrate my own approach when asked to comment on controversial documents.

26 January 2015

On Monday 19 January the main item in the UK's TV and radio news was the very critical reaction by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) to a letter sent to about 1,100 mosques by Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State at the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG). The Prime Minister David Cameron was also involved, robustly defending Mr Pickles.

This page is organised as follows:

My explanation of how I believe the MCB had simply misunderstood the DCLG letter.

A short outline of my own approach when asked to comment on potentially controversial documents.

The day after the furore, I wrote a short piece for the Conservative Home website which went through the MCB's criticisms line by line and matched them against the text in the DCLG letter that the MCB appeared to be objecting to. It shows how the MCB simply misread the letter.

The piece is reproduced below.

Mohammed Amin: The MCB has misunderstood Pickles’ letter to mosques

On Monday morning I was speaking to school pupils in Warrington. Accordingly the first I heard about the letter from the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) to mosques and the resulting furore was when I saw David Cameron on TV defending it vigorously.

As a chartered accountant, my immediate reaction was to track down the full text of the letter (available here) and read it. I thought it was fine, and could not see why any Muslim should object to it.

Yet I heard the Muslim Council of Britain’s (MCB) Deputy Secretary General Harun Rashid Khan complaining about it on BBC Radio 4’s “World at One” and afterwards the MCB sent Eric Pickles an open letter.

In passing, I was quite pleased to hear David Cameron say on the radio “Everyone needs to do more to tackle violent extremism”, which is almost verbatim the title of a website page I wrote nearly four years ago.

The MCB’s complaints

Reading the MCB letter I identified the following complaints, which are quoted alongside the text in the DCLG letter which appears to have upset the MCB.

(Their letter does not itemise the offending DCLG text; the table below is entirely my own work.)

No.

MCB complaint

DCLG text

1

“Indeed, as one of the largest Muslim umbrella bodies in this country, we did not receive this letter.”

N/A

2

“we do take issue with the implication that extremism takes place at mosques”

“show them these men of hate have no place in our mosques or any place of worship”

3

“that Muslims have not done enough to challenge the terrorism that took place in our name”

“But there is more work to do.”

4

“you were somehow endorsing the idea that Muslims and Islam are inherently apart from British society”

“You have a precious opportunity, and an important responsibility: in explaining and demonstrating how faith in Islam can be part of British identity.”

5

“We also reject suggestions that Muslims must go out of their way to prove their loyalty to this country of ours.”

“There is a need to lay out more clearly than ever before what being a British Muslim means today: proud of your faith and proud of your country.”

6

“That is why we feel your letter to Muslims, at this critical time, could have been worded differently.”

N/A

Are the MCB and I reading the same letter?

All of us have preconceptions which emerge when we construe text that is not written in legal language aspiring to eliminate all possible ambiguity. (Sadly ambiguity still creeps into legislation all too often!)

Actually no assumption is necessary, since DCLG spell it out: “British values are Muslim values. Like all faiths, Islam and its message of peace and unity makes our country a better and stronger place, and Britain would be diminished without its strong Muslim communities.” The MCB appears to have ignored this text when construing the DCLG letter.

Before looking at the specific MCB complaints, it is essential to remember that every text must be read as a whole, with individual sentences understood in the context of the entire document. I am perpetually pointing this out to people who latch onto particular verses in the Quran which they regard as problematical without considering what the Quran as a whole is saying.

Responding to the complaints

One

With regard to MCB’s first complaint, I would have expected national organisations to be written to, not just mosque imams. I suspect that the MCB got omitted as a result of DCLG’s database decisions, rather than any desire to keep them in the dark.

Two

As to the second, the DCLG statement of aspiration seems unobjectionable to me, especially in a letter written to mosque leaders. The DCLG letter is not saying that people are being radicalised in mosques today.

However the MCB’s objection is excessive; while most radicalisation appears to take place outside mosques, it would take a lot to convince me that nobody had ever been radicalised as a result of preaching in UK mosques. Hopefully that is not happening today.

Three

The proper response to complaint three is that with a problem as serious as this, none of us can ever do enough. If any of my children were radicalised and committed terrorism, I would be asking myself for the rest of my life what more I could have done to prevent that.

Four and five

The most serious complaint, the fourth, arises from not understanding who the intended recipients of the message the DCLG is writing about are. While it would have helped if DCLG had stated that explicitly, it is clear from reading the DCLG letter as a whole that this message is primarily intended for Muslim young people, to help reduce the risk of their being radicalised.

I also see a secondary audience, not suggested by DCLG’s text, which is the rest of British society, since getting the message over to them aids community harmony. The Government is not an intended recipient of the message, not least because the DCLG letter makes it clear that the Government already “gets it.”

The same overall response applies to the fifth complaint.

Six

At a trivial level, complaint six is always true, since any human text can always be improved. However what the reaction of the MCB and some other Muslim groups shows is that perhaps DCLG should have allowed for the risk of recipients having existing negative preconceptions.

DCLG could then have gone out of its way to spell out exactly who the above messages were intended for, rather than assuming that the recipients would read the letter as it is clearly intended to be read.

The MCB letter concludes by requesting a meeting. If I were Eric Pickles, I would invite them in to ask how the MCB is going to help tackle this issue which is of vital concern to all of our society.

The MCB and I

In the interests of full disclosure, from 2008-2010 I was an elected member of the MCB’s Central Working Committee and chaired their Business and Economics Committee. Since then, I have had no connection with them apart from an annual donation of £100.

I believe that the organisation’s heart is in the right place, but that it has impaired its effectiveness by trying to please too broad a range of British Muslims.

My own approach with potentially controversial documents

Over thirty years of giving professional advice about taxation taught me that there is no substitute for reading the original document in full before making any comments. Had the MCB done so, and asked themselves exactly who the letter was written to, and what messages they were being asked to give to whom, they would not have misdirected themselves as they so clearly did.

The best example I can give of the need for careful reading is almost four years old.

On 5 February 2011, David Cameron made a speech at the Munich Security Conference. Around lunchtime, BBC News 24 (as the channel was then called) telephoned me and asked if, as then Vice Chairman of the Conservative Muslim Forum, I was willing to be interviewed about the speech later that day. At that time, unlike now, it was extremely rare for me to receive such media invitations.

At that time, I had only heard a brief trail of the speech in that morning's BBC Radio 4 "Today" programme. Accordingly I asked the BBC to email me the full text of the speech. I read this before agreeing to be interviewed.

In passing, the way that many people react to what they think a speaker has said, rather than what he actually said, is illustrated by the fact that many people still talk about David Cameron attacking "multiculturalism" in that speech.

He did nothing of the sort. In the speech he attacked "state-multiculturalism", once only.

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